735 - The Flashforward Fallback

18:18John August:And there's a cost to that. And sometimes the cost is 100 % worth it, but so often it's not. It should definitely not be an excuse for you to not try to think of an awesome opening scene that would be present tense. 100%. All right, let's answer some listener questions, which is most of what we're doing today. Do you want to start with this one about time jumps? Yeah, it feels relevant. Yeah. Michael writes, I'm writing a feature set in the late 70s that intercuts between present day 1977 and about seven months earlier. For the first roughly 40 pages, the script moves back and forth in five to 10 minute chunks, often in the same locations with the same characters.

18:54John August:These play like different timelines more than flashbacks. So my concern is clarity for the reader, especially someone skimming. The two timelines have very different tones. The present's darker and more grounded. The earlier timeline is warmer, slightly heightened, almost nostalgic. And the story really depends on tracking those shifts. So what's the cleanest, most professional way to signal these time jumps on the page? Yeah, it's a common thing you run into. That's an extreme situation though, because there's so many shifts back and forth and it's not large jumps in time. You know, if you go from the 1970s to the 2000s, it'll sort of just feel different, you know, from the way people are talking and probably what they're doing.

19:35But seven months in time is not a lot. So if it's something really subtle like that, the choices, as far as I can tell, are the kind of, well, the most mundane thing is just in your scene header. You just say what year it is. you can constantly remind people which part, I guess you'd have to go with the month if you're just doing a seven month shift.

19:59John August:Yeah, my instinct would be, because I've had to do this in a couple of things, is for the things that are set further back, you put past there and don't put present. Because the present is our present, that'd be confusing it. The present is assumed. So if you just put the years, I worry that you would actually, there's two timelines, just mark one of them differently. Seven months earlier is a weird thing to write. It's a weird thing to write like 40 times. Yeah. The other big swing you could do is to just let people know right off the top of the bat, this is what's going to happen in this script.

20:31When we're in this timeline, it looks like a regular script. When we're in this timeline, the font is like this.

20:36John August:So Greta Gerwig does this in Little Women and all of the past I think is in red. Yeah, exactly. And if you can visually set it apart, then you never have to mention anything. Yeah. Because they'll know. Yeah, because when you actually make your movie, you're going to do things to visually distinguish those two timelines. And it's just, it's a problem of the script on the page. And this is the kind of thing where people are, but the rules. I guess Greta Gerwig didn't hear about the rules. You know what? There's an interesting thing people ask, what is a common trait among successful screenwriters?

21:06And as far as I could tell, the only common trait is none of us give a damn about the stupid rules. Literally none of us.

21:14John August:Related to that with Greta Gerwig, I would say that she, and this is true to every good screenwriter I know, is she actually does care about the read and she's trying to make sure that it actually, she's fully communicating what the movie feels like on the page. That's our job. Yeah. That's our job. Oh, don't direct on the page. Yes, do it. And make sure people are feeling what you want them to feel. So what you said is what she cares about is the read, not the rules. Correct. Yeah. Now let's intersperse this with some random advice. Ooh. Where do you want to start with it? Let's start with Anais.

21:46John August:All right. She writes, my oldest is going to kindergarten in the fall. Oh, congrats. Any advice for the elementary school years? By kindergarten, your kid has probably already gotten all the daycare sicknesses. Basically, they pick up all the things, which is just fine. And no one gets chicken pox anymore because of the vaccine. Which is great. So listen, kindergarten is largely about learning to sit in a circle and just learning how to be around other kids and just do the things. And so they'll be very basic. They'll learn to read. They'll learn to count that stuff. But they mostly just like learn how to be a student and how to sort of follow some rules and follow some structure.

22:21John August:That should really be all your goal there. Yeah. I mean, the elementary years are the best years. So this is the good news on Ease. Your child is, I assume, five or six. It's typical kindergarten age. And by the time they're done with elementary school, they'll be 10. Yeah. And yeah, some kids, especially girls around 10, will start kind of tilting over into a different phase of life. But at least five, six, seven, eight, nine, those are the best years because they're children. And they are not wrapped up in anything adolescent. They are fun and ridiculous. And they still love birthday parties.

23:05They love birthday parties. So my advice to you, Anais, is, oh my God, enjoy this. because yeesh. Man, then it gets a little crazy.

23:18John August:One luxury you have when they're this age is that they probably get along pretty well with like a lot of kids. Yes. And so see if you can figure out which parents you can actually stand being around because you're going to play dates and birthday parties and stuff like that where you're going to just be around other kids' parents a lot. Yes. And if you can find friends, other parents you can stand to be around and your kids get along, you're happier, you're better. You know what? That brings to mind one last bit of advice I have for any ease. So I have two kids. One is on the spectrum. One is not.

23:48Now, the thing about kids who are neurodivergent is socially, as we know, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle socially, but children will generally struggle less socially in the elementary school years because everyone is kind of struggling socially because they're all so young. But what happens is somewhere around 11, 12, 13, what do we call the non-neurodivergent people? Neurotypical. Neurotypical kids will start to peel off and accelerate socially. And the neurodivergent kids just sort of stay where they are. And then the gap grows and then trouble starts. So one bit of advice I have for you, Ani, is if you feel like maybe your kid is neurodivergent and is struggling a little bit socially, but you're tempted to sort of go, oh, but they have friends, you know, keep an eye on it.

24:41Take it seriously because it's never too early to learn skills and it can become a significant issue for them and create a lot of stress for them and you once they hit those horrible middle school years.

24:54John August:Yeah, middle school is universally bad for everybody. Nightmare. If you're coming in there with extra challenges. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. All right, let's go back to normal questions. Charlie and Sheffield. I'm very hyped for The Sheep Detectives. Congratulations on your movie, Sheep Detectives. Yay, in theaters. I noticed Craig is credited with both screenplay and screen story. Yeah. What's a screen story? Why say both? And presented like this, aren't you just saying the same thing twice? No, it's embarrassing. And no, we're not saying the same thing twice, but I wish we could just fold it into one thing.

25:25Here's the brief summary. When you adapt something from source material, in this case, there was a book, Three Bags Full, written by a fantastic German author, pseudonymically named Leonie Swan. I don't even know her real name, but she's a lovely person. When you adapt things from source material, you get screenplay by. But if you adapt it in such a way that you create a story that is significantly different from the source material, then only through an arbitration, the Writers Guild may award the screenwriter also screen story by. The reason that's important for us as writers is it confers separated rights, which we've gone through in a prior episode.

26:04And if you get screenplay by and story by in an original film, they just fold it together and make it written by. Why they refuse? I've tried. They refuse to fold screenplay and screen story by into written by. Because they're like, well, because written by is just for originals. And so you end up with this very, very silly arrangement of multiple credits. I don't like it. I apologize. But that's reality.

26:36John August:And so it's one of those things which with great effort and probably a member vote, you could change. Yeah, to change those kind of credit things is elaborate and complicated. So it's a question of like, where do you spend your energy? You basically have to go to the membership to get a vote. and then you have to go to the A &PTP and have them agree to make that change also because it's dictated by the NBA. And so I will tell you that the A &PTP wants to say no to anything. Even if it's 100 % free, it will cost them nothing. If you offered them pizza, they would say, pay us for it. Absolutely.

27:12We're buying it for you. No, their immediate answer is no. They love saying no. Everything you ask puts everything else you ask in jeopardy. And so, of course, if the Writers Guild had a, many years ago, there was a mid-contract mechanism called the Contract Adjustment Committee, which was somewhat controversial. But the idea is that as little tiny things would come up inside of the term, you could then go back and without like an official reopening of the contract, adjust some things. And now that our contract term is four years, there is perhaps some wisdom in considering the value of something like that.

27:47This is the kind of thing you would do in that.

27:49John August:Yeah, totally. It's not a big money issue. It doesn't matter. It's just a sort of a little friction point. Absolutely. A related question, I think we may have answered on the podcast before, but sometimes a writer's name will appear multiple times in the credit block because they did some writing by themselves. They also wrote with a partner or they wrote with multiple partners on things. And so you see like one person's name mentioned three times in a credit block. It is weird and uncomfortable. And you could imagine some sort of scenario down the road where the mathematical credits should be a certain way and the actual credit you see on screen could be slightly different than that.

28:22It actually does work like that in those cases if the writers agree. Yeah. So if you have written by A and then end, the writing team of A and B, if writer A agrees, and they should, but sometimes they don't, it'll just say written by A and B, but A will get more residuals because of that. So that is possible. But in this case, not possible.

28:46John August:Yeah, weirdly. Yeah, it looks like I just threw a tantrum and asked for my name to be on there twice. No. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the movie. Let's answer a listener question from Colton. What is something that is undervalued yet offers the greatest return when it comes to health or quality of life? Oh my gosh. I will say relationships. And so obviously like having a life partner is incredibly valued. But I think like people kind of know that. I would say like other relationships, like relationships outside of your marriage are really important. And that you have a group of people that you can - Friends.

29:20John August:Friends, yeah. And so like our weekly D &D game, super important. My other friends who I see independently of Mike, super important. Yes, especially as men grow older. There's just so much research to show that women maintain lots of friendships as they get older and men don't. And then they just get sad and die. The answer I would probably say there is sleep. Yeah. By any means necessary. People struggle with sleep and you can get by on less than you should get. But the more you get, the better off it seems you are, unless you're depressed. But if you are feeling fairly mentally healthy, getting sleep, and if you have trouble sleeping, I'm a pro sleep aid person as well.

30:02Whatever it takes, I don't care. Sleep. And I know they'll say like, well, it's not as good of a sleep. It's better than not sleeping. You know? I just think people struggle and sleep is huge.

30:15John August:Money spent on a good mattress, a dark, quiet room. Yes. Try a white noise machine. Yes. Do the things. Blackout curtains. And although we're all trying to be energy conscious, one thing we do know is hard to sleep in a hot room. Yeah. Some air conditioning is good. Yeah. Yeah. Victoria has an audio question. I wanted to ask a question about the problematic way that unfilmable is used. I don't think it's a very helpful note because I almost never see it applied to visual logic issues. It's usually something that's directed at like, well, the camera can't see it, so it's not real. I also see it frequently criticizing a screenwriter's use of internal character narrative.

30:56I really like to use that and I like reading it, like not a ton of it. But I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is in the first Chernobyl script where Brukhanov is said to envision a very likely fate for himself. An inquiry, an arrest, a trial, a bullet. I love that because I feel it. I feel it from the script. But that said, I do think there is a valid note that applies to the invisible information being laid out for the reader that the viewer has no way of getting. So I guess my question is, when do you decide to add detail to a character's internal world? and when is the information on the script readable but not legible to the viewer?

31:39Thank you so much. Thank you. It's a good question. Well, I'm certainly a criminal when it comes to this. I do this all the time. But, Victoria, to me, the big difference in what I would call a kind of annoying and useless unfilmable and a helpful, useful, unfilmable is when it informs the actor so that they can perform something because then it is filmable. Their inner thoughts, their inner feelings and emotions come out when, I mean, most of the time, I think good direction is not about how to say the words. It's about how to feel or what you might want to feel here. And it comes through. It is filmable.

32:22So that line, for instance, Con O 'Neill made that clear in his performance. It was filmable. What I don't particularly find useful are these kind of omniscient, novel-ish narrations where a character's introduced and then the writer says, they're a so-and-so who thinks they're this and thinks that, but really they're this or really they're that. Well, that actually is not filmable because you're not their writer. if it's something the character is feeling in the moment or thinking in the moment, then yes.

32:56John August:Yeah, I would add to that. If the audience is going to experience that visually in watching the movie, then it's not unfilmable. And so sometimes you're really portraying, if you're talking about what this small village feels like and you're sort of giving description to it, that may not directly match what this is, but it's like, it can be a metaphor that just like helps us understand what this is going to feel like when we actually see it and it gives information to the director. Absolutely. 100 % valid. Absolutely. It's the kind of hot but doesn't know it is the classic, right? So that's the most cliche, horrible, unfamiliar is.

33:32So-and-so arrives, hot but doesn't know it. How the hell do I know that she doesn't know it? How is that possible that I can show that she doesn't know she's hot? I'm not sure anyone has actually ever not known they were hot anyway. But maybe some people do, but there's only one way for me to find out. And that's for her to be shocked when somebody thinks she's hot. Otherwise, it's useless. It's useless. So things like that, we avoid as best as we can. But anything that would help the actor, the production designer, the director, the costume designer, the composer making the score, anything that helps them is filmable.

34:16Absolutely.

34:16John August:I will also say there's things you might include in an outline or a treatment that don't make it through to the screenplay because those kinds of documents, they're preliminary and you can sort of swing bigger in some of those ways because it's not - They're meta. They're meta, yeah. They're talking about the show rather than - That's right. They're talking about the scene rather than being in the scene itself. Exactly. Yeah. Yes, they're meta. Whereas the screenplay is the drama. And yes, you can say whatever you want in an outline. You can interrupt yourself and say, okay, imagine this is sort of like from Breaking Bad except blah, blah, blah.

34:49Yeah. You can do whatever you want in LA.

34:50John August:That'd be dumb in a screenplay. Yes. Referencing another movie in your screenplay. Very, very dumb. Yes. Yeah. Final bit of random advice. Yeah, random advice from Nick. What advice would you give to your older self? Didn't we just do this? We did our younger self. Oh, this is older self. Older self. Yeah. I don't know. I guess I would have to do it based on my observation of older people and sort of things that frustrate me about them are things I've seen that worked really well for them. So let's go on the positive. Okay. Dick Zanuck, who produced Charlie and Chocolate Factory and Big Fish and many of Tim Burton's movies and was just an absolute mensch, I would say don't retire just because it's what's expected to happen to you.

35:30John August:He genuinely loved working and producing movies for Tim Burton. It gave him so much joy. And so he didn't stop just because he was old. He's like, he was loving doing it. And so why stop? He also called his sons every day. Oh my gosh. No matter where he was. And I love that for him. Oh. How old am I? You can decide. Yeah. Well, I'm going to project forward to quite old. My advice is don't bother doing a whole bunch of stuff to try and live longer. You're not going to. Just keep rolling. Just keep rolling. You're good. Yeah. You're good. No one lives forever. No one lives forever. You know? Just what are you going to do?

36:09Yeah. You start going to the gym every day. Nah, nah, you're not. Like at 80, you're going to decide that's when I'm going to start.

36:18John August:People don't fundamentally change. I think that's an important thing to remember. And when I see people say like, oh, well, maybe it'll change. Like, no, it won't change. They never will change. No, old dog, no new tricks required. I would advise myself to eagerly go to any lifetime achievement ceremony that might come my way. You never know what to do. Because, you know, that's actually the good sign that you're done. That's when you know they don't want you anymore. They start giving you the thank you for your service awards. Let's go to another audio question. This one's from Robert. Yeah, this one's also sort of follow up from our conversation about avoidance in episode 731.

37:00Hi, I just listened to your episode on a protagonist's motivation being driven by their desire to avoid things. I was just wondering if you have any tips for how to differentiate between a character driven by avoidance and a character that appears to have very little agency. I've received notes on a story that I am currently in the middle of. And about half the people respond to the character positively and can totally understand why he's doing what he's doing. while about the other 50 % of people seem to very much think that the characters doesn't have any agency, that they're very much just reacting to everything around them and therefore is not very likable.

37:54Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

38:00John August:Let's recap what we were talking about before with avoidance. So the thesis of that episode, 731, was that we tend to think about sort of characters going off on a quest and wanting to do it and achieve things, but often they're just trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. And in agency, we're talking about a character's ability to take action that moves them in a direction they want to move in. So they sort of like proactively go after a thing. And they're related concepts, but they're not quite the same. A prisoner has very little agency over certain aspects of their life. A person trapped in a bad domestic situation might have little agency over certain things.

38:35John August:and yet as an audience, we get frustrated by watching that person because we feel trapped there with them. Yes. So this is a bit different than the question of wanting something or avoiding something. This comes down to Robert is describing what we would often call a passive character, which is a very easy character for people giving notes to pick on. And here's why. Passive characters don't seem to demand our attention because what we're looking for in stories are those special moments in someone's life where something important happens. There are some art movies where you just sit there and watch someone stroll around through some random week of their life.

39:18I don't like those. I like movies where stuff happens. So when you have a character who doesn't have agency, at a minimum, you have to give them a desire, a hope, some sort of need. Even if you were to say, hey, here's a story about a prisoner. They're never getting out, ever. And there's no way to get out. Then the question is, how do they survive here? Can they find love? Can they find some sort of spiritual peace? Can they figure out how to handle their own guilt or remorse? Can they seek amends? What is it that they want to do? they need something? Or are they just trying to stay alive, which would be avoiding death?

40:05But either way, what you really can't do is just get pushed around and react without any goal.

40:16John August:Yeah, I want to stick up for and defend two different groups. The groups who might say like, well, there's a whole range of cinema that is valid, which has passive passive heroes, passive protagonists, where they're just sort of seeing that their daily life. That's absolutely valid. That's not kind of what we focus on on this podcast, which is movies where things happen. Movies where people go on a one-time journey that is transformational, which can absolutely happen in a prison movie. But you're right in saying that there has to be a point of view, a perspective that the movie has on this character and why we should be caring about this character and why we'd be so interested and invested.

40:54John August:And so I want to defend the people giving these notes saying like, I didn't connect or didn't relate because this character just wasn't doing anything. It wasn't moving the ball forward. And that was my set of expectations. That's what I want. Yeah. And so as we said from the start, from Comedy Tonight, you're setting a frame on like why we're supposed to be paying attention to this character in this situation, what the journey is going to be. Yes. And maybe that's really the issue is you're not properly establishing what it is we should be looking for in this movie with this character following things forward.

41:24Great. Great points. And there is a genre that I would call person trapped in lunacy. Kafka writes these stories beautifully. Brazil is sort of Terry Gilliam's movie. Brazil is insane and bananas. Jonathan Pryce is a cog in a massive machine who slowly starts to realize that he's a cog in a massive machine. But then, of course, it changes him. There's also the after hours slash something wild type of story where an average Joe sort of ends up in a series of wild circumstances that they weren't expecting. And they are pushed around, except inevitably they're also in desperate need of this and they fall in love.

42:10John August:Yeah. And the point of the story is you need to live. Yeah. These are sort of essential, I think, to traditional storytelling. Certainly if you hand somebody a script that doesn't have that, give them fair warning. This is not one of those scripts. If you don't like stories where nothing kind of happens, this one isn't for you. It's fair. I have a question from Mare. I've been working on an original screenplay that features a nine-year-old girl. I've had a few professionals in the field read it and provide really helpful notes, but one producer-director argued that, in no uncertain terms, that unless I were to direct a film about a child protagonist, a film featuring a child would never be made and could never be sold.

42:53John August:He suggested that if it was something I needed to write that I should write this as a book instead of a screenplay. I'd appreciate your insight on this opinion. I can't shake the story and most of the stories I'm drawn to feature younger people coming of age. John, what do you think about this producer and his interesting insight into Hollywood? this producer can say, like, I wouldn't make this movie and that's true and that's valid. Not a problem. But is there somebody who would make this movie? Yes. They've made movies about children, starring children since time immemorial. Shirley Temple, for God's sake, But not to mention, you know, Little Man Tate and Sixth Sense and the movie where Macaulay Culkin died from a bee sting.

43:33Spoiler alert. I mean, there's been so many movies. Home Alone. Home Alone. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There's so many movies starring, you know, I don't know. Are they specifically nine? I don't know. But yeah. Like how old was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone? Probably nine or ten. Let's Google that. Yeah. I'm tempted to say about this producer, what an idiot. Yeah. And so I'm going to. What an idiot. Macaulay Culkin was nine years old. He was nine years old in Home Alone, one of maybe the most successful family film of all time. And the reason I don't like this producer is because they're doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist.

44:23It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it's an assumption of authority they do not have. And they are inviting people to just throw a wadded up poster of Home Alone in their face. And so I shall do so virtually. Ha!

44:40John August:Is it valid to say it's harder to make a movie with a nine-year-old protagonist? Sure, but it's hard to make any movie. Come on. They're all hard. Every movie's hard. The thing Mayor should take away from this is try to get your movie made. Also, hopefully this script is great and that this is a sample for you to do other stuff too. So like you should not avoid writing the thing you want to write because it has a child protagonist. Stand by me. Stand by me for God's sake. I'm going to actually get angry about this. So Mare, broad advice for you now for your life. Anyone who says you can never do blankety blank in Hollywood, especially when it's something that you know you can, don't argue just walk away they're not the person for you cut them out of your life and I don't know who that producer is but if they are successful it's a mistake literally a cosmic error yeah yeah and there's producers who would say like oh you can't make a like a no budget horror film because like it's not a thing they don't want to make exactly exactly yeah you could say I'm not going to make it and you could definitely say it's really hard making a movie with a nine-year-old kid as a star because the restrictions on shooting with children are very specific and very onerous.

45:58John August:And also well-intentioned and good. Oh, necessary. We don't want child labor laws to be violated, but it's tough. We have kids on our show all the time, usually in smaller parts, but we just know, here's the deal. The time they take to ride there and the time that they're in the makeup chair, the time it takes to take the makeup off, that plus lunch, plus their teaching time, plus their mandated rests, and they can't work more than eight hours total anyway, including all that stuff, you end up, you know, maybe four hours shooting with them, maybe. Charlie and Chocolate Factory had, you know, five kids and like how, yeah, challenging.

46:39It ends up costing way more money to make the same amount of movie with a kid than it would with an adult. Like you said, for good reason. and still people do it all the time because it works all the time. I'm not saying it doesn't fail all the time, but when I say all the time, I mean lots of the time throughout history.

46:59John August:Let's do another audio question. This one's from Sydney. Hey, John and Craig. My name's Sydney. My question is craft-related, so I find that in my scripts, I often describe a lot of movement in the action lines, like a character walks this way or crosses the room, And I'm actually noticing I end a lot of scenes with a character leaving a room or walking away from another character if they've just had a confrontation. And I just feel like I do that very often, especially with the ending, the scenes that way. And I don't know how to end them. Like, is it better to just end on the dialogue line or is that cutting it off too early?

47:35Sometimes it feels like that's almost getting out too early. But maybe that's just because I'm used to ending it with someone walking away. But yeah, I've been looking at other scripts for movies or pilots I've seen just to compare what's on the screen versus what they wrote in that scene. But I did just want your guys' input to see what you thought.

47:55John August:Well, it's because she's noticing a pattern and it's bugging her a bit that she's doing it. So that's valid. Listen, characters walking away in a scene, it's a choice, but if you're doing it in every scene, something weird. It's a rough choice specifically for ending a scene. if somebody walks away with purpose if it is shocking that they walk away if they walk away and slam a door behind them if they walk away and disappear into a fog, sure if they finish an argument and then turn and walk away you're just sort of watching that and then the question is okay, let's imagine us in the movie theater where are we going to put our camera at that point you need to really end the scene on how the person who is being left feels That's more important than just somebody walking away because you're not just going to watch people walking.

48:44It's sort of shoe leather there at the end of a scene.

48:46John August:Yeah. So I would ask, Sydney, if we're following the person who's walking away, a good choice can often be they have the confrontation, cut, and then we find them walking away and then we can focus on them. The reaction they don't want to show to the other person and sort of what that is, that's a chance for us to sort of get into that space. So just look at what you're doing there. In terms of the movement within a scene, Craig and I are both huge fans of screen geography. Yes. Let people move around, let us see where things are going. Yes. I mean, you might worry like, oh, you're going to box people in on the blocking.

49:17John August:Nah. You'll figure it out. But it gives a sense of what the flow is in the space and what things are like. Because if you just have, if it feels like two characters are just standing, talking to each other in a scene, it's not good. No. And if you don't know how physically it's possible for these things to happen, you end up with directors on the day just coming up with stuff, which they seem to love, which I don't. Lots of bits. I think it's important for the screenwriter to give everybody something real to hang on to. And then when you get there, if it's not quite working, you adjust. I do that to my own writing all the time when I'm directing, but at least have a basis that is set in reality.

49:56So moving people around, where are they standing? Lindsay Duran's most important question. You see two people are standing in a bar. Where? In the bar. against the bar, by a wall? Why are they standing by a wall? Why aren't they sitting? How did one get there so quickly from all the way across the room? You know, these questions are worth asking. But when you end a scene, one thing that you mentioned is, okay, you can cut to the next thing. So Sydney, don't think about the ending of your scene as the ending of a scene. Think about the ending of a scene as one side of a cut. And the other side of the cut tells us something about how you ended and how you end it is going to tell us something about what you see next.

50:37And if you start thinking that way, so for instance, if you have somebody walking away and the next shot is somebody else walking toward us or somebody else walking away that's a different person or there's some sort of contrast, that could be interesting. Think about the relationship between what we call the A side of the cut and the B side of the cut.

50:54John August:Yeah. And if you had two walking scenes back to back, it could work, but it's also going to feel kind of weird. It's going to start getting a little silly, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So you got to think about that. what's also good that you recognize in Sydney is like movies are not plays. Right. And so you don't have to enter and exit characters all the time. The film does that for you which is just great. Last bit of advice for you. I love a door. Love a door. Love a door. I am obsessed with doors. I write doors all the time. And I know there are things that I do that have you seen that like Aaron Sorkin Supercut where he just like reuses dialogue all the time?

51:29It's all really good. I don't do that I don't think. But just giving away one of my like crutches, people will have a conversation with somebody, then turn, walk away, get to a door, stop, turn back, say one last thing and then go. And the door closes. And that's an end of a scene. A door closing, scene's over. I like that. It's better than just walking.

51:50John August:We're gonna have Elaine come on the podcast shortly to talk about Devil Wears Prada. But I think I noticed in her movie, which I may not have time to bring up in our conversation is glass doors. And so there's a lot of times where people are like walking, like so you're able to see somebody through a glass door but not open the door or the decision to open a door or not open a door and so like that movement becomes really important and what they can see and what they can't see. I love it. Doors. Doors. Doors. Helpful. Doors and windows. Big fan of doors. Let's answer a question from Andrew. I searched your transcripts and looked in the script notes book but I haven't found an instance of you two tackling best practices for cutting down your screenplay.

52:25Huh.

52:25John August:You mentioned how vast Scott Frank's early drafts are. Poor Scott. Yeah. Yeah, but it's well known. It's quite well documented. Well, my question is, how does he trim those back? Everything in my script seems so important and special. I've condensed many scenes, and I've arrived late and I've left early. All right. This is a great question. I think we should save it for a major marker. It's its own marquee topic. I know I've written on a blog about cutting, and to give you a taste of what's to come, it's like you can make the small changes, but ultimately if you really need to cut a lot, you need to make big changes.

52:58John August:You need to cut scenes and sequences rather than trying to just take all the fat out of existence. It's definitely a topic worth its own episode because I think if you have a lot to cut, it is either an indication of the nature of your process or a problem with the story itself and the way it was conceived in the first place, if you have a lot to cut. But for some people, it is part of their process and they're aware as they're writing that, okay, I'm not sure if this is going to make it in or not, but I kind of need it now. Sounds like this, in this case, I like all of this. Well, okay. Then I suspect there's actually an unseen problem here that we will dig into and diagnose at a later time.

53:41At a later time.

53:42John August:Let's do our One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by somebody named Momsbury. Momsbury? Momsbury, M-A-L-M-E-S-B-U-R-Y. And what they're doing is they're looking back at a cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One, which is a book from the mid-1980s. My heart just sank. So it garnered momentary attention on the internet as being the world's saddest cookbook. So, I mean, honestly, most microwave cooking is for one, but that is such a sad, such a profoundly sad title. Well, you would think so. So it's written by Marie T. Smith. She wrote this book, Microwave Cooking for One. What I like about this blog post is it's going back and sort of just like resuscitating and sort of reframing, basically, how to think about this cookbook because the author goes through and actually makes a bunch of the recipes.

54:30John August:It's like, this woman, Marie T. Smith, was an absolute genius. Okay. In terms of if you take the mandate of like, okay, what is the best way to cook everything on earth in a microwave oven? And she just figures it out and basically like do this for seven seconds and this, this, and like she has all these techniques for like browning and crisping things in a microwave. It is basically a pay on to like the power of technology and the wonders of a microwave oven. So I get that it would be incredibly useful. It's just the title. Oh, it is. And why did it need to be for one? You know what I mean? If she's so good at stuff, why limit it to just, you could just say, if you're going solo, do this.

55:07If you're cooking for two to four, do this. I mean, for one.

55:12John August:So the blog post does go into the whole, the one of it all. Because also like cooking for two, it's like it's more than twice as long to do it because it's not like heating an oven or a fry pan where like you can sort of do, it's just as quick to do it for two as for one. It actually is different. I just love, we don't reward like domestic home life sort of optimization and stuff to where we should. We don't acknowledge like, oh, there's actually, it's like a scientific rigor applied to things you don't normally sort of apply it to. Some great early life hacks. Yeah, completely. And so this would have, it's a person like if she had lived at the YouTube era, we would celebrate her as like, look at this woman who's like, figured out how to do all this stuff.

55:48I just, you can't shake the image of somebody softly crying while the little thing inside the microwave rotates and just, you know, waiting. And it's always like, it's still always three minutes left.

55:59John August:Yeah. Eternally, it is eternally three minutes to go. So Craig, I don't know if you've witnessed this phenomenon when you have like work crews on a site, like they're doing stuff at your house. Sometimes they will bring a microwave oven to plug it into them and they'll have a microwave oven on their truck and they'll just heat up all their food, which I just find terrific and remarkable. I just love it. Oh, a little microwave is a powerful, I mean, look, We're old enough to remember what life was like before them. Absolutely. I remember our first microwave. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time you microwaved something, you lost your mind.

56:27Incredible. Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way about the air fryer. Yeah. The air fryer is just incredible.

56:33John August:Yeah. We don't have an air fryer. It is spectacular. Yeah. Everyone loves it. Basically, it's like a microwave, not technologically, but practically, it's like a microwave that takes maybe twice as long as a microwave would. But crispy. But tastes 10 times better. Yeah. And so in many ways, I was reading a different blog post about like technologies and like sort of what's the earliest the technology could have been invented. And the air fryer is just a hairdryer like mounted differently. It's just a massive convection. Yeah, hairdryer. Hairdryer thing that works so well. We could have had them 30 years ago and it's wild that it was a recent innovation.

57:08John August:And there it is. My sister introduced me to that. Yeah. To the air fryer many years ago. So we played D &D and we had pizza. We often do. And I always over order pizza because I'm a Jew and if you run out of food, you go to hell. We don't even have hell, but they make you. They make hell for you. So I end up freezing all these slices of pizza and putting pizza in a microwave is sad. Putting pizza straight from the freezer, a slab, like a piece of slate, put it in an air fryer, eight minutes later, brand new pizza. Like it just got made. It's spectacular. So lacking an air fryer, what we do is heat up the oven with a pan in there so the pan gets hot and then you put it on there 400 degrees in a few minutes delicious air fryer air fryer that's great Craig what's your one cool thing well as is often the case I have a game now as everyone knows I'm rather obsessed with Baldur's Gate 3 yeah and because I love what Larry and the company that made Baldur's Gate 3 did I went back and I played Divinity 2 and then Divinity 1 which were the prior games and of course I will play the upcoming Divinity.

58:19But I'm out of Larian games to play. So, of course, I go on my Steam Deck like, let's say you love Larian games. What's like it? What's like it? And the answer is, well, here's something like it. And it is. This is not at Larian level. But I appreciate what this company is doing. They're very small, actually. There's a company called Tactical Adventures. Do they have the polish of a Larian game? No, because I think the entire company like 35 people or something, where Larian, I believe, employs hundreds of people. But they made a game called Solasta 2. Solasta. They made Solasta 1, Crown of the Magister, and then they made Solasta 2.

59:03It is in early access right now, which is how Larian does their games too. So they don't give you the entire game up front. They give you like a chunk of it, and then they're using it to kind of get feedback, debug, advanced features. But what I really enjoy, and it works like Baldur's Gate very much, what I really enjoy about it is that it is not just based on the Dungeons and Dragons rule set and encyclopedia the way that Baldur's Gate was. It is firmly, very strictly attached to fifth edition rules. So the way we play, that super crunchy way, that's how this works. And I actually find it on that level fun.

59:42I wish them great success. I believe in little companies trying things. not everything has to be Baldur's Gate 3. Totally.

59:48John August:So you're playing on Steam Deck. Is it just a Steam game? I'm playing on Steam Deck. It is available for platform. I guess it's available on PC as well. I guess everything that's on Steam is theoretically PC-ish. I've not been using my Steam Deck at all recently. So maybe I'll break that and try it. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with the Steam Deck. It's hard for me now to... I know I could sit down and play, and I will. Like when, look, once Grand Theft Auto 6 hits, I'm not going to be on my damn Steam Deck. I'm going to be playing on the biggest screen I have on my PlayStation going crazy. Have you hooked up your PlayStation to your big screen downstairs?

1:00:29No. So it was initially, my home used to be owned by Kevin Williamson. So Kevin had set up a Sony PlayStation down there to go on the big home theater screen. But it was an older PlayStation. and when I moved in I was like it's such a big screen it's kind of overwhelming yeah

1:00:50John August:that was my worry so rather than kind of feel like I'm being punished by the game I'm playing is so big I mean even though the sound down there is great it's a little bit better on just like a good old fashioned big ass wall mounted yeah so I play like upstairs in a little gaming nook oh nice it's my gaming nook cool everyone needs a gaming nook that's the advice we needed to everyone needs a gaming nook doesn't matter how big or small whatever your game is doesn't matter could be a puzzle nook could be whatever you want to do whatever you gotta have one gotta have a nook yep that is our show for this week Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli possibly outro this week is by Nick Moore if you have an outro send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com that's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today if you want to include an audio version of your question go for it you'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

1:01:48John August:The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. I just saw, you put through an email that we're on another college's curriculum. Yeah. I think it was University of Missouri, Kansas City, I think. University of Missouri, Kansas City, yeah. Nice. So those students have to buy the book. Those students have to buy the book. That's how we do it. One by one. Apparently the first time they've ever signed a book and the book is ours. Wow. Well, that's great. Thank you, University. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast.

1:02:18John August:We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. And 80 % of you really enjoy it. Yeah, which is fantastic. So thank you for continuing to enjoy it. I think it was like more like 90. 90 % of you enjoy it. It was a very high number. you can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on Hollywood parties Craig it's always a Hollywood party with you aw thank you Craig thank you Drew thanks